PositiveThe RumpusSok’s collection...deftly represents what is so difficult to represent: the haunting of history, the twisting of lies into truth, forced misremembering or erasure, and the will to heal ... It seems a mistake to think of Sok’s poems as surreal or magical because they speak to a haunting that is felt, experienced, bodily. The poems’ surrealism or disorientations live in material reality. In this collection, history’s haunting is not metaphorical or imagined ... Sok forces readers to imagine the protective time warp and simultaneously to grapple with the losses imbued in its supposed safety. Sok illustrates the intertwined nature of the past and the present, how the past continues to live in the present, though shifted ... Distrust and paranoia can live on in the body as trauma. Throughout A Nail the Evening Hangs On, Sok points readers to how these practiced sentiments haunt generations of Cambodians and Cambodians in diaspora today.